About This Class

Join design icon Aaron Draplin as he shares tried and true techniques for customizing type – an essential skill for graphic designers of all levels. In this 90-minute class, you'll follow along as Draplin digs for antique typographic references and then creates several type treatments of his own to design merchandise for Portland, his beloved hometown. The lessons cover:

Discovering reference material

Kerning - owning the space between characters

Customizing letterforms

Sketching type from scratch

Prepping a file for print (and even finding a good promotional item vendor to work with!)

Draplin teaches you to avoid "default" typeface settings and to take ownership of your design by managing the forms, in-between spaces, and relationships of the letters you're working with. Once you master customizing type, you'll have a powerful skill in your design toolkit for every branding, logo, and visual styling project that comes your way.

Bred from the loins of the proud Midwest, this little fucker was squeezed out in Detroit, in the year 1973 to the proud parents of Jim and Lauren Draplin. Growing up on a steady stream of Legos, Star Wars, family trips, little sisters, summer beach fun, stitches, fall foliage, drawing, skateboarding and snowboarding, at 19 he moved west to Bend, Oregon to hit jumps "Out West." His career started with a snowboard graphic for Solid snowboards and took off like wildfire soon after. Everything fr...